Packetarium platform with eight boards based on multiple Freescale QorIQ P4080 processors delivers 128 cores and industry leading performance

AUSTIN, USA & TAIPEI, TAIWAN: Freescale Semiconductor, a leading supplier of embedded semiconductors, in close collaboration with Advantech, a global manufacturer of telecom computing blades and multicore network processor platforms, announced the addition of the first member of Advantech’s Packetarium product line to feature advanced QorIQ processors from Freescale.

The Packetarium NCP-7560 platform features eight boards, each of which incorporate two P4080 processors. The P4080 processors integrate eight 1.5GHz cores and feature advanced capabilities such as on-board acceleration, enhanced encryption engines and a clear application migration path for legacy Power Architecture and PowerQUICC customers.

“Advantech’s Packetarium platforms feature an innovative system architecture based on QorIQ P4080 devices to create a powerful network processing solution that is capable of truly outstanding performance,” said Preet Virk, strategic marketing director for Freescale’s Networking Processor Division. “Packetarium is a highly scalable solution that enables applications to efficiently address increasing network traffic demands.”

The NCPB-2210 Packetarium board provides four DIMM sockets for up to 16GB DDR3 memory at 800 MHz with ECC support. Two XAUI (10GbE) ports connect each NCPB-2210 to the Packetarium system’s main board for high-speed switching.

Freescale's QorIQ processor technology provides outstanding performance for a range of applications. The combination of QorIQ technology with Packetarium gives integrators and equipment manufacturers what they need to address scalable throughput requirements, provide differentiated value and services, and offer the flexibility for future evolution and additional protocol support.

In addition to the board’s enhanced, multi-core packet processing capabilities, the QorIQ P4080 Datapath Acceleration Architecture accelerates packet classification, filtering, and packet queuing.

The acceleration technology is ideal for cost effective management of broadband service optimization solutions that leverage deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, giving service providers the visibility and control necessary to truly optimize Internet service delivery applications.

“Companies who develop and deploy applications on Packetarium platforms with QorIQ technology may achieve dramatic increases in application performance and network throughput while significantly reducing their product development costs and accelerating time-to-market,” said Byron Lin, director at Advantech’s Networks and Telecom Group.

“In addition, software engineers already familiar with PowerQUICC development won’t need to learn special purpose programming models or tools for packet processing; instead, they can continue to use the same architecture and tools they already have,” he added.

The NCPB-2210 Packetarium board is planned to be integrated with Freescale’s VortiQa security application software. VortiQa software is optimized to take full advantage of Freescale’s QorIQ processor technology, including pattern matching engine, security accelerator, datapath acceleration and other technologies.

The combination of the Packetarium platform with VortiQa software enables application-optimal mapping of functionality, thereby boosting performance in asymmetric multi-processing (AMP), symmetric multi-processing (SMP) and hybrid AMP+SMP systems.

Advantech Packetarium systems integrating the NCPB-2210 board will be sampling in 3Q10 and will be previewed at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Orlando on June 21-24.